HMS Tudor (P326): Adopted by the People of Bridgend

Laid Down at Devonport

HMS Tudor was built at Devonport Dockyard, launched on 23 September 1942 and commissioned on 19 December 1943 under Lieutenant Stewart Armstrong Porter, a T-class submarine adopted by Bridgend Borough during a wartime Warship Week fundraising campaign, with the commemorative plaque marking that connection preserved today at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.

Seven Patrols in the Far East

After trials and training around Plymouth, Holy Loch, Scapa Flow and Larne, Tudor deployed to the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee from mid-1944.

Her seven war patrols included beach reconnaissance missions and the sinking of a junk off the northern Malacca Strait, minelaying off the coast of Siam, the destruction of a Japanese coaster by gunfire off Sumatra, and further sinkings of sailing vessels off Burma, schooners and sea trucks in the Java Sea rounding out a varied record of anti-shipping and special operations work.

A Postwar Posting to Canada

Tudor departed Fremantle in August 1945 bound for Portsmouth, arriving on 5 October 1945, and in April 1949 sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a three-month deployment training alongside Canadian surface vessels in anti-submarine warfare, a valuable contribution to Allied training cooperation in the early Cold War years.

The End of Her Service

HMS Tudor returned to the UK in July 1949 and was eventually sold for scrap on 1 July 1963, broken up at Faslane, closing out the career of a submarine that had carried the goodwill of an entire Welsh borough with her from the Far East to the coast of Canada.